As the creator of some of the earliest courses in women’s studies and the chair of the conference that sparked what became National Women’s History Month, Gerda Lerner made contributions beyond measure to the field of women’s studies.

Gerda Lerner was a pioneer in the field of women’s history. She was born in Vienna, Austria in 1920. As a teenager, she experienced the Nazi’s rise to power and became involved in the underground resistance movement. She was imprisoned and then, with her family, forced into exile. In 1939, she alone was able to find refuge in America, where she became a political activist.

Back in the day (as we now say) when I was an undergraduate at a college that had been educating the country’s elite—all men, of course—for almost 350 years, the first ripples of Second Wave feminism were stirring things up outside the ivy covered walls. Inside, in a classroom filled entirely with women, an untenured (but well-published) female Senior Lecturer was teaching the institution’s first course on women’s history.